Fringe review: Drunk Girl

Getting a room full of adults to participate in a frosh students’ pro-rape chant takes a whole lot of guts and a whole lot of skill, neither of which playwright Thea Fitz-James is short of.

In her confronting piece, Drunk Girl, Fitz-James investigates the “feminist paradox“ surrounding alcohol and drinking and looks at how women continue to be victim of society’s double standards and how a young generation of women face the choice of ‘drinking like one of the boys’ but then being punished or blamed when the affects of alcohol are identified as a central contributing factor in assaults.

Fitz-James examines the culture of alcohol while growing up in small towns, “small towns that Stuart Mclean visits”, and how booze and binge drinking have become normalized, and how the rituals surrounding alcohol have become so ingrained in today’s society.

Ultimately, Fitz-James explores the question: How we do save these drunk girls from themselves?

It’s not an easy subject to probe, but Fitz-James does it with panache.

Despite lacking a convincing ending, which might just have been a case of first-night jitters, this is a must-see performance at this year’s Fringe.

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